Tag Archives: rational male

A quick heads up, I’ll be a guest on Christian McQueen’s new podcast, Man in Demand Radio, Thursday, April 2nd (my birthday no less). I’ll be on with Christian at 12 noon PST. We’ll be discussing topics from my latest book, Preventive Medicine – which published this month – as well as questions from readers, the red pill subreddit forum and twitter.

If there’s something you’re wanting to ask me please leave it in the comments here or over at Christian’s thread. You can always tweet me or Christian too.

The last show was the most downloaded stream of Christian’s old shows. This new one promises to be a bit different however, it’ll be more informative and less banter. Christian is taking a new tact with this show – I promise to watch my “uhms” and Christian promises to limit the expletives. We plan to go for about 2 hours (maybe more) this time.

Just a footnote: We do plan to discuss the Germanwings tragedy for a bit rather than me doing a post about it.

I came across another familiar story on the TRP Reddit this week. It’s familiar because this story is becoming increasingly more common as Hypergamy becomes a more open secret that women can no longer keep under wraps.

For the better part of 2014, and in Preventive Medicine, I explored the social trend of Open Hypergamy and the impact it’s beginning to effect on contemporary western(ized) culture. In that exploration I published Saving the Best (another TRP link), a story which revolved around the increasingly more common post-Epiphany Phase “regrets” women have when their Party Years indiscretions are made evident to the Beta men who committed to them in monogamy or marriage.

Have a read of Saving the Best before you continue here, you’ll see the commonalities immediately. I’m going to dissect this “confession” a bit as I go, but bear in mind this woman’s predicament is the direct result of the unintentional Red Pill awareness that Open Hypergamy has brought men to – even uninitiated Beta men.

An update, for those asking for it. Here’s the link to my original post although the text has been deleted? Before I get into the details, I’d just like to say I greatly appreciate the support this community extended me. Believe it or not, I read every response.

As of this morning, we still hadn’t slept in the same bed or spoken more than 10 words to each other in passing. As I was waking up, he was walking in the front door with two coffees. He sat me down at our kitchen table and finally opened up to me.

Basically he feels that he was “conned” (his word) into the marriage, saying that he wouldn’t have even dated me, let alone married me, if he’d known what he knows now. His view of me has been irreparably changed and he no longer sees me “as someone worthy of being [his] wife”. (quoting him here… fucking prick) Beyond the sexual aspect, he says he no longer trusts me because I “kept something this big” from him our whole relationship.

One of the primary disconnects women are conditioned to believe during their Epiphany Phase is that a “good man” will be willing to forgive and forget her past indiscretions. On their journey of self-exploration and discovery women are encouraged to adopt a finely tuned cognitive dissonance with who they conveniently become and what should be the consequences of their pasts. While men are expected to live up to their responsibilities as men, and are expected to own up to the consequences of their failures, at the Epiphany Phase women are encouraged to convince themselves that they become someone else – someone who was “so different” from who she was in her Party Years.

Her husband feels “conned” because he was conned; conned after discovering the dual personality of his pre and post Epiphany Phase wife. What we’re expected to believe here (courtesy of the social conventions emplaced by the Feminine Imperative) is that her husband is some prudish, moralistic throwback unwilling to accept and embrace the “real” her – the one who was trying to “get it right” by turning over a new leaf with him. This is the easy, ready-to-use shame that women have available to them; if a man becomes indignant over a woman’s sexual past it translates into his insecurities as a man. His feeling conned over his bait & switch marriage is redirected to being his problem.

Men aren’t off the hook with that convenient convention either. There’s a moral high ground many men want to claim and cast the actions of a guy in this circumstance as virtuous and a proper revenge for being mislead. While that may feel good, men in this situation aren’t disillusioned with their ‘unworthy’ wives from a moral pretense, but rather that they believed they would be entitled to their wives’ sexual best reserved for him. As I quoted in Saving the Best, they “marry a whore who fucks like a prude.”

Subjectively that may or may not be the case, but it’s the freedom and genuine desire with which their wives had sex with prior (Alpha) lovers; desire that wasn’t based on material provisioning, emotional investment or the logistical hoops women expect their post-Epiphany “good men” to perform to in order to merit their sexual and intimate attentions. That’s the disconnect, that’s the con; Alpha Bad Boys get her 3-Way genuine sexual abandon with no investment expected, while he’s got to maintain ‘multiple businesses’ in order to get a prosaic sexual experience with her. The Bad Boys got her sexual best for free, while he’s expected to accept her as the ‘new’ post-Epiphany her…

Nothing I could do or say could convince him that these were past mistakes and not reflective of who I am today. He wasn’t angry with me, didn’t call me a slut or anything like that. Never once raised his voice. Part of me wishes he did, although I can’t exactly say why right now. It felt like I was being laid off from a job.

As I mentioned, the expectation is for her husband to accept “who she is today”, yet who she was ten years ago had a more genuine desire for less established, but sexually arousing, lovers. I’m going to speculate here, but it’s likely that a man who owns multiple businesses spent more of his time diligently and (I presume) responsibly cultivating those enterprises than the men his wife took as lovers ten years ago. Again, we can see that as a moral virtue on his part, but there’s a root indignation of what her past represents within the context of his (I assume) responsible past.

And like a good business owner he plays the confrontation calmly and collectedly. The part of her that wishes he’d raised his voice is the same part that got excited by the Alpha indifference of her former lovers.

So that’s it. We are getting divorced. My supposed life-partner turning his back on me without a second thought. He didn’t even have the decency to discuss it with me first – apparently he visited his lawyer during the week and “the process is in motion” (his words). Knowing him, there is absolutely no changing his mind.

My husband owns multiple businesses and wouldn’t get married without a prenup. I signed it, honest-to-god thinking we’d never, EVER have to use it. Well, he had the fucking document with him this morning. He said he’d pay off the remainder of my student loans, which he isn’t “legally obligated” to do. While I appreciate that, I am going to meet with my lawyer this week and see if the agreement can be challenged in court. We have built a life together, I gave him 5 of the best years of my life and I’ve been 100% faithful to him – I don’t fucking deserve to be tossed out like a piece of trash.

So that’s it. My life turned upside-down in the span of a week, over something I did 10+ YEARS AGO BEFORE I EVEN KNEW HIM. It’s fucking asinine. The thing is, even as I wrote the original post, in the back of my mind I knew he was through with me. He’s ended friendships and business partnerships over less.

Ghosts of Epiphanies Past

In Preventive Medicine I go into a bit of detail about men in this increasingly common circumstance. There is a subconscious expectation on the part of Beta men who find themselves at or just past women’s Epiphany Phase, that predisposes them to believing that what they’ve become as a result of their perseverance throughout their 20’s has now come to fruition and the women who ignored them then have now matured to a point where he’s the ‘sexy’ one at last.

Unless men have a moment of clarity or a Red Pill initiation of their own prior to this, what they don’t accept is that this expectation is a calculated conditioning of the Feminine Imperative to prepare him for women like this; women who can no longer sexually compete for the Alpha Fucks they enjoyed in their Party Years. The Feminine Imperative teaches him that he can expect a woman’s “real” sexual best from the “real” her – why else would she agree to a lifelong marriage if he weren’t the optimal choice to settle down with? Why wouldn’t she be even more sexual than in her past with the man she’s chosen to spend her life with and have children with?

That is the message the Feminine Imperative used to subtly and indirectly imply to Betas-in-waiting. Now with the comfort of Open Hypergamy this message is published in best selling books by influential women:

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”

― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Not to belabor Sandberg yet again (she has been hocking the tired out Choreplay meme recently), but this is essentially the outline of the script we’re reading in this woman’s lament. She’s essentially followed Sandberg’s advice only to find that her Beta-in-waiting bought into the same script too. The problem for her is that he took the “nothing’s sexier” part to heart only to find that someone else was sexier long before she’d convinced him otherwise.

For what it’s worth, fem-centrism has far less to fear from the manosphere revealing the ugly Red Pill truths about Hypergamy and more to worry about from pridefully self-indulgent women gleefully explaining it to the general populace themselves. Roosh had a tweet this week with what would likely have been the attitude of our subject wife ten odd years ago:

The more common Open Hypergamy becomes and the more proudly it’s embraced by the whole of women the less effective shaming men into acceptance of it will be. However, I thought it was entertaining when the counter-comments on Saving the Best questioned how common this situation really was or else thought it was trolling.

I think it’s much more prevalent than most men would like to admit. Perhaps not as dramatic as this example, but far more common for a majority of men who’ve tacitly accepted that the woman they married (or paired with) gave her best to her prior lovers and are too personally or family invested to extricate themselves from her after they’ve realized it. That investment necessitates them convincing themselves of the pre-planned memes the Feminine Imperative has prepared for them – that they are doing the right thing by forcing that dissonance out of their minds.

A lot of Betas-in-waiting like to claim a personal sense of vindication about their successfully pairing and breeding with women who they believe are (and were) their SMV evaluate equals once those women have “got it out of their system” with regards to self-discovery and Alpha indiscretions. In a sense they’re correct; often enough these are the men who gratefully embrace a woman’s intimate acceptance of him precisely at the point when his SMV has matured to match this woman’s declining SMV. I call this crossover the comparative SMV point in my SMV graph.

Even women on the down-slide of their SMV like to encourage the idea that their post-Epiphany decision to marry the Plan B Beta provider (long term orbiter) is evidence of their newly self-discovered maturity. How could they have been so foolish and not seen how the perfect guy for her had been there all along? That consideration gratifies the ego of a Beta who’s been hammered flat by rejection or mediocre experiences with women up to that point.

The primary reason I spent the last year compiling Preventive Medicine was to help men see past the compartmentalization of women’s phases of maturity, but also to help them see past their own immediate interpretations of those phases as they’re experiencing them. Long term sexual and intimate deprivation (i.e. Thirst) will predispose men to convincing themselves of the part they believe they should play in the social conventions of the Feminine Imperative. Their own cognitive dissonance is a small, subliminal price to pay when they believe they’re finally being rewarded with a woman who’s now ready to give him her best.

What inspired me to this post was reading a cutesy photo-meme on Facebook. The syrupy message was “My only regret was not meeting you sooner so we could spend more of our lives together” superimposed over some kids in black & white holding a rose. Then it hit me, this was a message a guy was posting to his girlfriend; the one he’d met after his second divorce was finalized. What he didn’t want to think about was that if he’d met her sooner she’d have been too busy “discovering herself” to have anything to do with him.

When Neil Strauss was writing The Game there was an interesting side topic he explored towards the end of the book. He became concerned that the guys who were learning PUA skills and experiencing such success with women of a calibre they’d never experienced before would turn into what he called “Social Robots.” The idea was one that these formerly Game-less guys would become Game automatons; mouthing the scripts, acting out the behaviors and meeting any countermanding behaviors or scripts from women with calculated and planned “if then” contingencies.

The fear was that these Social Robots “weren’t themselves”, they were what Mystery Method, Real Social Dynamics, etc. were programing them to be and the relative success they experienced only reinforces that “robot-ness”. My experience with guys from this blog, SoSuave and other forums has been entirely different. If anything most men transitioning to a Red Pill mindset tenaciously cling to the ‘Just Be Yourself and the right girl will come along’ mentality.

A strong resistance guys have to Red Pill awareness will always be the “faking it” and keeping it up effort they believe is necessary to perpetuate some nominal success with women. They don’t want to indefinitely be someone they’re not. It’s not genuine to them and either they feel slighted for having to be an acceptable character for women’s intimate attention or they come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to maintain ‘the act’ indefinitely. Either way there’s a resentment that stems from needing to change themselves for a woman’s acceptance – who they truly are should be enough for the right woman.

I’ve written more than a few essays about this dynamic and the process of internalizing Red Pill awareness and Game, but what I want to explore here is the root idealism men retain and rely on when it comes to their unconditioned Game. In truth this Game is very much the result of the conditioning of the Feminine Imperative, but the idealistic concept of love that men hold fast to is what makes that conditioning so effective.

What’s Your Game?

I’ve written before that every man has a Game. No matter who the guy is, no matter what his culture or background, every guy has some concept of what he believes is the best, most appropriate, most effective way to approach, interact with and progress to intimacy with a woman. How effective that “Game” really is is subjective, but if you asked any guy you know how best to go about getting a girlfriend he’ll explain his Game to you.

Men in a Blue Pill mindset will likely parrot back what their feminine-primary conditioning had him internalize. Just Be Yourself, treat her with respect, don’t objectify her, don’t try to be someone you’re not, are just a few of the conventions you’ll get from a Blue Pill guy who is oblivious to the influence the Feminine Imperative has had on what he believes are his own ideas about how best to come to intimacy with a woman.

For the most part his beliefs in his methodology are really the deductive conclusions he’s made by listening to the advice women have told him about how best to “treat a woman” if he wants to get with her. A Blue Pill mindset is characterized by identifying with the feminine, so being false is equated with anything counter to that identification.

When you dissect it, that conditioned Blue Pill / Beta Game is dictated by the need for accurate evaluation of men’s Hypergamous potential for women. Anything that aids in women’s evaluating a man’s hypergamous potential to her is a tool for optimizing Hypergamy. The dynamics of social proof and pre-selection are essentially shortcuts women’s subconscious uses to consider men’s value to her. Likewise the emphasis Blue Pill Game places on men’s ‘genuineness’ is a feminine conditioning that serves much the same purpose – better hypergamous evaluation. If men can be conditioned to be up front about who they are and what they are, if they internalize a mental point of origin that defers by default to feminine primacy, and if they can be socially expected to default to full and honest disclosure with women by just being themselves, this then makes a woman’s hypergamous evaluation of him that much more efficient.

This is where most Blue Pill men fail in their Game; who they are is no mystery, their deference and respect is worthless because it’s common and unmerited, and just who he is isn’t the character she wants him to play with her.

So even in the best of Blue Pill circumstances, a man is still playing at who he believes will be acceptable to the feminine. His genuineness is what best identifies with the feminine. Blue Pill / Beta Game is really an even more insidious version of social robotics; the script is internalized, the act is who he is. However, it’s important to consider that this genuineness is still rooted in his idealistic concept of a mutual and reciprocal love.

We want to relax. We want to be open and honest. We want to have a safe haven in which struggle has no place, where we gain strength and rest instead of having it pulled from us. We want to stop being on guard all the time, and have a chance to simply be with someone who can understand our basic humanity without begrudging it. To stop fighting, to stop playing the game, just for a while.

We want to, so badly.

If we do, we soon are no longer able to.

In The Burden of Performance I made the case for men’s need to perform for feminine acceptance and how men’s idealistic concept of love centers not on a want for unconditional love, but rather a love free from the performance requirements women’s opportunistic, Hypergamous, concept of love demands of him. This quote sums up that idealistic want for rest from having to perform to earn a woman’s love and acceptance.

The problem of course is the supposition that a performanceless love would ever really be love, but men’s idealistic nature still believes that the state is realizable. On a social scale the Feminine Imperative sees the resource utility in this and so encourages the idea that both men and women mutually share his concept of idealized love. Thus men, unaware of the respective differences in concepts both sexes hold with regard to love, enter into a perpetual state of qualifying for a love they believe women should be capable of. Men will work hard, build empires and amass fortunes to come to that state of performanceless rest they idealize should be possible with a woman.

The Marriage of Idealism and Opportunism

About two weeks ago I was called to the carpet in the commentary by George Meeks (one of many aliases) for what he believes was an inconsistency in my assessment of men’s idealistic concept of love and how that idealism is really symbiotic with women’s opportunistic concept of love. I’ll spare you his autistic attention trolling, but he did raise a few points I do need to clarify about how men and women’s separate, but purpose driven, concepts of love developed.

In the beginning of this series I stated that men and women’s approach to love was ultimately complementary to one another and in this last model we can really see how the two dovetail together. That may seem a bit strange at this point, but when social influences imbalance this conventional complement we see how well the two come together.

When a woman’s opportunistic approach to love is cast into the primary, dominant love paradigm for a couple, and a family, that pairing and family is now at the mercy of an opportunism necessitated by that woman’s hypergamy and the drive to optimize it. Conversely, when a man’s idealistic approach to love is in the dominant frame (as in the conventional model) it acts as a buffer to women’s loving opportunism that would otherwise imbalance and threaten the endurance of that family and relationship.

7. Arguments about chores, money, sex life, and romance were highest in couples where the woman made all or most of the decisions. Female decision-making status was an even stronger determinant of relationship dissatisfaction than female breadwinner status. Women can handle making more money in a relationship, but they despise being the leader in a relationship.

8. Argument frequency decreased among female breadwinners if they were not the primary decision-makers. Lesson for men: You can have a happy relationship with a woman who makes more than you as long as you remain the dominant force in her non-work life. Or: GAME SAVES MARRIAGES.

When a woman’s love concept is the dominant one, that relationship will be governed by her opportunism and the quest for her hypergamic optimization. The ultimate desired end of that optimization is a conventional love hierarchy where a dominant Man is the driving, decisive member of that sexual pairing.

This was the meat of George’s confusion. As with the opportunism that Hypergamy predisposes women to, men’s idealistic concept of love stems from his want for genuineness and a want for what could be. I’d suggest that men’s idealism is the natural extension of the burden of performance. From a Beta perspective, one where women are his mental point of origin, that burden is an unfair yoke; one to be borne out of necessity and ideally cast off if he could change the game. To the Alpha who makes himself his mental point of origin, that burden is a challenge to be overcome and to strengthen oneself by. In either respect, both seek an idealistically better outcome than what that burden represents to them.

In and of itself, a man’s idealism can be a source of strength or his greatest weakness. And while unfettered Hypergamic opportunism has been responsible for many of women’s worst atrocities to men, in and of itself Hypergamy is the framework in which the human species has evolved. Neither is good nor bad, but become so in how they are considered and how they are applied.

Men’s idealistic concept of love is a buffer against women’s opportunistic concept of love. When that idealism is expressed from a Beta mindset women’s opportunism dominates him and it’s debilitating. When it’s expressed from an Alpha mindset it supersedes her opportunism to the relationship’s benefit.

Conditioned Idealism

If you want to use Blue Valentine (the movie) as an example, the guy in the relationship abdicates all authority and ambition over to his wife’s opportunism. He idealistically believes “love is all that matters” and has no greater ambition than to please her and ‘just be himself’, because his conditioning has taught him that should be enough. His Beta conditioning convinced his idealism that his wife would shared in that idealistic concept of love in spite of his absence of performance. Consequently she despises him for it. She’s the de facto authority in the relationship and he slips into the subdominant (another child to care for) role.

Now if a man’s Alpha, willful, idealism propels him to greater ambition, and to prioritize his concept of love as the dominant, and places himself as his mental point of origin for which a woman accepts you can see how this leads to the conventional model. His idealism is enforced by how he considers it and how he applies it.

Men’s idealistic concept of love can be the worst debilitation in a man’s life when that idealistic nature is expressed from a supplicating Beta mentality. It will crush him when that idealism is all about a bill of goods he idealistically hopes a woman shares and will reciprocate with. This is predominantly how we experience idealism in our present cultural environment of feminized social primacy.

From an Alpha perspective that idealism is a necessary buffer against that same feminine opportunistic concept of love that would otherwise tear a Beta apart.

There was a time when men’s idealistic concept of love was respected above the opportunistic (Hypergamy based) concept of love. I explored this social control of Hypergamy in Women Behaving Badly.

Under the old set of books, when men’s attractiveness (if not arousal) was based on his primary provisioning role his love-idealism defined the intergender relationship. Thus, we still have notions of chivalry, traditional romance, conventional models of a love hierarchy, etc. These are old books ideals, and the main reason I’ve always asserted that men are the True Romantics is due exactly to this love-idealism.

There was a time when men’s idealistic love concept pushed him to achievements that had social merit and were appreciated. Ovid, Shakespeare and the Beatles would not be the human icons they are if that idealism weren’t a driving force in men and society. Likewise, women’s opportunistic, hypergamy-based concept of love, while cruel in its extreme, has nonetheless been a driving motivation for men’s idealistic love as well as a filter for sexual selection.

Under the new set of books, in a feminine-centric social order, the strengths of that male idealism, love honor and integrity are made to serve the purpose of the Feminine Imperative. Men’s idealistic love becomes a liability when he’s conditioned to believe that women share that same idealism, rather than hold to an opportunistic standard. This is what we have today with generations of men conditioned and feminized for identifying with the feminine. These are the generations of men who were conditioned to internalize the equalist lie that men and women are the same and all is relative. From that perspective it should follow that both sexes would share a mutual concept of love – this is the misunderstanding that leads men to expect their idealism to be reciprocated and thus leads to their exploitation and self-abuse.

A man’s idealism becomes his liability when he enters a woman’s opportunistic frame still believing they both share a mutual concept of love.

Back in February I had an interesting exchange with commenter TuffLove. The conversation focused on his recent singleness due to his wife of 20-some years feeling the call of the Alpha and decided cheat on him, later divorce him and then take up with an even more Beta fellow not long after her ‘fling’ (his story). You can read the whole exchange here if you like, but what TuffLove describes is a textbook example of the Alpha re-interest impulse that defines the Development and Redevelopment/Reinsurance phases I outlined in the Preventative Medicine Series.

Not to rub salt in the wound, but you and your ex’s story is a cliché now. It’s the “making up for missing out” story. Woman marries early, cashes her chips in before she knows better, lives vicariously through her single girlfriends until such time that the “Alpha” she knew at 20 is the hapless Beta she’s saddled with at 39.

Divorce porn media convinces her to bail out and get with the Alpha she’s always missed for all that time. She did everything in reverse – Beta comfort and dependability through her party years, to be traded for Alpha excitement before it’s too late.

I was inspired to sift back through my comments for this conversation, because I was also made aware of a new example of both this phase’s dynamic and the divorce-porn industry that will inevitably find some very fertile soil to plant itself in.

This example comes to us courtesy of Robin Rinaldi, author of The Wild Oats Project. This book and the “experiment in cuckoldry” such as it was, centers on, you guessed it, a 40-something woman who abandons her marriage for one year to bang the random men she was prevented from fucking by being married to her dependable, unexciting Beta husband. Granted, the husband didn’t want children and this contention resulted in him getting a vasectomy – his only act of Alpha with her as far as I know. Her childlessness is of course her go-to victimization card she hopes will endear feminine sympathy for her taking matters into her own hands for a year.

The de rigueur rationalizations and appeals to womanly “self-discovery” are handed out like the M&Ms any Red Pill man will come to expect, but I’m drawing attention to this book because it has the potential to be the next step in the 50 Shades of Grey evolution of Open Hypergamy:

Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project.” And not just the book. Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project” phenomenon — the debates, the think pieces, the imitators and probably the movie. Get ready for orgasmic meditation and the Three Rules. Get ready for “My Clitoris Deals Solely in Truth” T-shirts.

On a social scale it seem like the next deductive next step – blend a justifiable Eat Pray Love narrative with the more visceral (yet unignorable) sexuality of 50 Shades and women will readily consume it. I expect there will be the same hamster spinnings of NAWALT and most women respect their marriage vows, but it still wont wash with the overwhelming ‘guilty pleasure’ popularity that 50 Shades exposed on a large scale.

Writers like Rinaldi and E.L. James have tapped into the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks anxiety rooted in women’s primal insecurity inherent in doubting their optimization of Hypergamy. If appealing to visceral sex sells products to men, appealing to the inherent ‘you-only-live-once’ insecurity of feminine Hypergamy sells to women – and women being the primary consumers in western society, sell it does.

Ballista asks, on his site, “why is divornography (divorce pornography) marketed exclusively to women? Why are there articles in women’s magazines and romance novels for women like Eat Pray Love that glamorize divorce, but nothing of the sort exists or is marketed to men? Why is there no male divorce porn, no stories of men divorcing their obese, aging harpy wives, liberating themselves from their marriage vows, and ending up living happily ever after banging large-breasted 21 year-old lingerie models?”

Can you imagine the uproar? Can you feel the Love yet?

Since the start of the sexual revolution there’s been a social undercurrent of excusable, justifiable comeuppance for any gender related imbalance women have been taught to believe that men are enjoying or benefitting from. Whatever male-specific indignation that would reflect negatively on men becomes a form of empowerment for women – particularly if that indignation facilitates men’s sexual strategy at the expense of women’s. Thus a woman taking a yearlong break from her marriage to bed as many men as she cares to indulge (fully expecting to come back to her dutiful Beta husband afterwards) is cast as an iconoclastic hero for casting off “patriarchal sexual repression.”

Furthermore, it’s only a small step to wipe the accountability of her actions off on the horrible man who wont cooperate by doing his duty to fulfill her sexual strategy. There is no more permanent a devotion to the male sexual strategy than to get a vasectomy and thus deny a woman the ultimate culmination of her own. If you ever want to experience just how close to livestock the Feminine Imperative considers men to be, just try getting a vasectomy before you’re married or without a wife’s explicit and written consent. Legally it’s easier to geld horses or neuter dogs.

It’s important to consider how the doubt over past hypergamous choices effects a mature woman. When a woman has passed through her Epiphany Phase and become a never-married woman into her late 30s the mindset becomes one of self-justification. This is similar to the Kate Bolick effect whereby a woman has very little choice but to live with her past intimate decisions and convert necessities into virtues. She embraces a ready-made empowerment narrative wherein she convinces herself that her choices were the bold, unconventional ones she needed in order to grow.

Next and most commonly is the woman who consolidated on a man’s commitment once she’d become less sexually competitive just prior to 30. I can’t be sure, but it’s likely that Rinaldi falls into this demo, the schedule more or less plays the same.

From Preventative Medicine IV:

Redevelopment / Reinsurance

The Redevelopment phase can either be a time of relational turmoil or one of a woman reconciling her hypergamous balance with the man she’s paired with.

The security side of this hypergamous balance has been established for her long term satisfaction and the Alpha reinterest begins to chafe at the ubiquitous certainty of that security. Bear in mind that the source of this certainty need not come from a provider male. There are a lot of eventualities to account for. It may come from a ‘never married’ woman’s capacity to provide it for herself, the financial support levied from a past husband(s) or father(s) of her children, government subsidies, family money, or any combination thereof.

In any event, while security may still be an important concern, the same security becomes stifling for her as she retrospectively contemplates the ‘excitement’ she used to enjoy with former, now contextually Alpha, lovers, or perhaps the “man her husband used to be”

“Steve has been with me for the past 50 years and Ron for 47. Neither is the man I am married to, nor have I seen or spoken to either since our love affairs ended in my 20s. All the same, there is no denying they have both messed with my marriage to Olly, the man who has been by my side for the past 40 years.

I found myself thinking about them both as I read recent research that suggested women who played the field before marriage are unhappier with their lot than those who entered matrimony virginal.
Angela Neustatter has often questioned what life would have been like had she married another man

Angela Neustatter has often questioned what life would have been like had she married another man.”

I think it’s important to remember that an Alpha Widow doesn’t even necessarily need to have slept with a man she considered ‘Alpha’ from her past to feel the Alpha Widow effect:

Five minutes of alpha — even worse, five minutes of alpha rejection — can fuck with the heads of even the most desirable women. And continue fucking with them years later. In comparison — if the reports are to be believed — women who divorce beta schlubs after years of marriage pretty much forget them before the ink is dry on the papers.

Sometimes being an Alpha Widow means hypergamic ‘rumination’ over a better Alpha option a woman missed or was rejected by in her past in comparison to the guy she “settled on” for marriage. This is particularly significant if that guy was a woman’s Plan B husband. It’s not just the actual Alphas she banged back in the day, you’re competing with an imagined ideal and the more women are empowered and encouraged to feel secure in exploring their hypergamous options (i.e. correct their ‘soul mate’ mistake) the more you’ll read stories like this.

However, for all intents and purposes my instincts tell me Rinaldi falls into the “making up for missing out” demographic. On whole this demo of women can eventually become the worst self-inflicted Alpha Widows in their latter years. I let Rinaldi explain…

“I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers,” she declares. “If I can’t have one, I must have the other.”

If you’re wondering why that is the relevant trade-off, stop overthinking this. “The Wild Oats Project” is the year-long tale of how a self-described “good girl” in her early 40s moves out, posts a personal ad “seeking single men age 35-50 to help me explore my sexuality,” sleeps with roughly a dozen friends and strangers, and joins a sex commune, all from Monday to Friday, only to rejoin Scott on weekends so they can, you know, work on their marriage.

[…] One of her oldest friends calls her out. “How is sleeping with a lot of guys going to make you feel better about not having kids?” she asks. Rinaldi’s answer: “Sleeping with a lot of guys is going to make me feel better on my deathbed. I’m going to feel like I lived, like I didn’t spend my life in a box. If I had kids and grandkids around my deathbed, I wouldn’t need that. Kids are proof that you’ve lived.” It’s a bleak and disheartening rationale, as though women’s lives can achieve meaning only through motherhood or sex.

As I illustrated in Preventive Medicine, there’s a root insecurity inherent in women’s Hypergamy. From an immediate perspective this can manifest itself as a battery of women’s psychological and sociological filtering mechanisms for Hypergamous optimization with a man she’d just met, to the husband she’s been married to for 20 years. However, it’s vitally important for men, particularly married and LTR men, to understand that the confines of a committed relationship is never any insurance against Hypergamy in the long-term, and the rationalizations of that Hypergamy evolve as women mature.

Of course the first, best advice is the simplest “just never get married”, but even if you are a single man entering your 50s you will encounter women who’ve experienced (or never experienced) a crisis of Hypergamy and the incessant drive for Alpha optimization of it. If you are a younger man dealing with an older woman (why, I don’t know) you will likely encounter women like Rinaldi and women with similar mindsets as Robin Korth. It’s important to know what you are, or will be, dealing with.

About two weeks ago I came across the above video (h/t Tom Leykis), but only recently have I watch it in its entirety. At first I’d thought it was yet another endorsement of the “expatriate and find a feminine wife” set of the manosphere, but it’s a much deeper documentary than this.

Although this video is directed towards the African-American demographic, what these men and women describe is reflective of the greater endemic that feminine social primacy has wrought in society on whole. Overall I think the video illustrates some strong points in regard to the reality of the imbalanced dynamic between men and women today, but it doesn’t really account very well for the causes of these imbalances.

The overarching narrative comes from the mistaken idea that egalitarian equalism is an achievable ideal between the sexes. So within this context when a man describes his need to be the leader in his family, to be the provider as well as the teacher of his children and the person with the answers in his marriage, his characterization becomes (conveniently) one of an outdated masculine insecurity.

In an equalist ideal state it shouldn’t matter to him that his wife is more educated or earns more money than he does. As Sheryl Sandberg has once again illustrated, men should be reprogrammed to feel more comfortable in traditionally women’s supportive and submissive roles – and any discomfort with that is evidence of an antiquated masculine insecurity or “feeling intimidated” by a Strong Woman®.

To explain this second problem it’s important to grasp how men are expected to define their own masculine identities within a social order where the only correct definition of masculinity is prepared for men in a feminine-primary context.

What I mean by this is that the humanness that men wish to express in showing themselves as vulnerable is defined by feminine-primacy.

For the greater part of men’s upbringing and socialization they are taught that a conventional masculine identity is in fact a fundamentally male weakness that only women have a unique ‘cure’ for. It’s a widely accepted manosphere fact that over the past 60 or so years, conventional masculinity has become a point of ridicule, an anachronism, and every media form from then to now has made a concerted effort to parody and disqualify that masculinity. Men are portrayed as buffoons for attempting to accomplish female-specific roles, but also as “ridiculous men” for playing the conventional ‘macho’ role of masculinity. In both instances, the problems their inadequate maleness creates are only solved by the application of uniquely female talents and intuition.

Perhaps more damaging though is the effort the Feminine Imperative has made in convincing generations of men that masculinity and its expressions (of any kind) is an act, a front, not the real man behind the mask of masculinity that’s already been predetermined by his feminine-primary upbringing.

So within this context a man is already hamstrung for ever expressing the idea that he feels he needs to be the Man in his marriage. That ridiculous need shouldn’t matter to men because in an equalist framework it shouldn’t matter to women that he’s not out-earning her or is more educated.

Of course the problem with this fantasy is that it does actually matter to women that a man leads and a man performs. Women resent supporting men. No matter how an equalist mindset sells it, humans evolved for a complementarity that will always confound equalism.

Pay close attention to the sentiments of the women in this video. Every one of them embraces the empowerment meme that equalism has them internalize, yet all still feel that pairing with a man they deem less than themselves is a compromise or “settling” for him. They’re doing him the favor by compromising their Hypergamy with a suboptimal man.

What this illustrates is the inherent conflict between equalism and complementarity. In spite of men’s reprogramming for accepting a “supportive” role, and despite women’s empowered aspirations of self-sufficiency, both still have an innate need for a gender-complementary relationship that they cannot reconcile in an equalist social framework. Women still want to pair with a man they can be aroused by and respect. They still want that +1 to +2 SMV differential that promotes a strong attachment to him. Men, in contradiction to all known risks and in contradiction to any expectation of appreciation, still want to pair with a feminine woman who idealistically supports him, follows his lead and willingly nurtures him with her body and spirit.

What this equalist vs. complementarity dichotomy presents to men and women is that it fundamentally places both sexes into the Subdominant model of intersexual hierarchies. In that model the man is perceived as another dependent ‘child’ for her to support while he wonders why the supportiveness his equalist conditioning has taught him women need isn’t appreciated for what it is. Not only this, but again within that framework, a woman feels indignant for having to apologize for the ambition and education that equalism has convinced her she should be empowered by and men should appreciate by default.

Love Interests

Within this egalitarian framework the difference between men’s idealistic concept of love and women’s opportunistic (Hypergamy based) concept of love are placed into distinct contrasts. For all of the obfuscation about imbalances in education, a man’s idealistic concept of love predisposes him to believe the equalist lie that his performance shouldn’t be the basis of her opportunistic concept of love.

When you listen to the sentiments of both the men and particularly the women in this video you’ll see this played out. When a woman assumes the dominant role in a relationship her provisioning becomes the benchmark for that dominance. Of course, this is a reversal of the conventional, complimentarian model, but when women are put into that reversal the reality of their opportunistic concept of love becomes uncomfortably obvious to love-idealist men. While Open Hypergamy is becoming increasingly more obvious on a social scale, it’s far more poignant on a personal, in-your-face scale within a modern marriage or relationship.

Predictably the documentary veers away from this intergender conflict and places the blame for that conflict squarely on the shoulders of characteristically irresponsible men not being the fathers they should be – blaming an individualist mindset for men’s absence from the family without addressing the glaring individualism the women display in the first half of the video. The equalist narrative has to be reset and in order to do that it’s got to conveniently dip back into the conventional complementarity well and appeal to the traditional sense of duty to family and compliance with exactly the responsibility equalism would otherwise chafe against.

However, what equalism and the Feminine Imperative can’t sweep away is men’s overt contingencies for Open Hypergamy. One of those very deductive contingencies is moving to another country where the environment favors men’s sexual strategy, not to mention a refreshing sense of being appreciated by conventionally feminine women. If Game isn’t appealing and going your own way makes you lonely, it only makes sense to go fish where the fish are.

I recently read Bachelor Nation on CNS News, and once again it predictably foists the responsibility for men’s reluctancy to marry on irresponsible ‘kidult’ men.

“Far too many young men have failed to make a normal progression into adult roles of responsibility and self-sufficiency, roles generally associated with marriage and fatherhood,”

Nowhere will you see a woman lay claim to the social fallout feminine primacy has effected on themselves. Female importance is the socially correct narrative, thus the failings of that narrative, the failings of feminism, and the failings of the agenda of equalism are due to men unwilling to cooperate in seeing it succeed. 70% of men aged 20 to 34 are not married and the default presumption is that it’s men who are unwilling to accept their adult responsibility and marry a woman who will statistically earn more than him and resent his inability to measure up to her performance standards – the standards made glaringly evident in this documentary.

In a feminine-primary social order to be a ‘responsible’ man is to comply with dictates of women’s sexual strategy while accepting her dominant and counter-feminine role and demeanor. To be a ‘real man’ he must accept being relegated to being her dependent while still being expected to be a good father. To be an ‘adult’ he must accept the doctrines of equalism while still being beholden to the responsibilities of conventional complementarianism.

Building on the core works of The Rational Male – Preventive Medicine presents a poignant outline of the phases of maturity and the most commonly predictable experiences men can expect from women as they progress through various stages of life.

Rational and pragmatic, the book explores the intergender and social dynamics of each stage of women’s maturity and provides a practical understanding for men in dealing with women in those phases.

Preventive Medicine also provides revealing outlines of feminine social primacy, Hypergamy, the ‘Hierarchies of Love’ and the importance of understanding the conventional nature of complementary masculinity in a world designed to keep men ignorant of it.

The Rational Male – Preventive Medicine seeks to help men who “wish they knew then what they know now.”

The book is first in of series complements to The Rational Male, the twelve-year core writing of author/blogger Rollo Tomassi from therationalmale.com. Rollo Tomassi is one of the leading voices in the globally growing, male-focused online consortium known as the “Manosphere”.

I’ll be updating this to a permanent page once the print version of the book is live on Amazon.

I’d like to thank all my regular readers and commenters. It was your input and insight, and the questions we put to each other that made this book possible. I’m often asked why I’ve never moderated the comments on Rational Male, this book is why. I’d also like to personally thank Sam Botta for doing the forward and helping with promotion of my work.

I’ll be doing an ‘Ask Me Anything’ of sorts in this week’s comment thread if you have questions about the book. My purpose with this book is to formalize the work I did in the Preventive Medicine series as well as provide some support material. If you’re a regular reader here, you already know I make my material freely available, however, I have fleshed out a lot of the original content more thoroughly as well as adding some new material in the book.

Preventive Medicine is intended to be a complement to The Rational Male core works – an important supplement, not an extension. I’ve decided that future Rational Male series books will center on that core work for reference to more specific topics. I think you’ll find the organization and direction of Preventive Medicine much more singularly focused than the first book. This is intentional. There was no feasible way to present the first book’s material without familiarizing readers with a lot of varied Red Pill topics. The Rational Male will always be the starting point for any new work.

Once again, my hope is that readers will share this book with the men they feel would need it the most. I hope you’ll “accidentally” leave a copy on a table at Starbucks or a school library. I hope you give it to your teenage nephew and your middle-age best friend going through a rough divorce. If you buy the digital copy, thank you, but do consider getting the physical copy to share with someone who wouldn’t otherwise consider exploring the Red Pill or the manosphere online. And if you get into a conversation about the book be sure you let them know about the first book too. Please spread the word.

This week Black Poison Soul has decided that Hypergamy is less about the well established, biologically sound and well-studied aspects of feminine Hypergamy and all about women behaving badly. For the most part this essay is so scattered, angst-ridden and poorly reasoned it hardly bears responding to – the author is obviously unfamiliar with the well documented biological, neurological and hormonal influences of ovulatory shift – however he does provide an excellent illustration of how sociological dynamics have also evolved to compensate for women’s inherent mating strategy:

Let’s look at it from a different angle. Let’s say that these characteristics attributed to hypergamy are simply learned bad behavior – or a lack of learned good behavior. Let’s say that these characteristics are becoming more commonly-noted because society has gotten a lot easier on women simply because they’re women (aka we give them the pussy pass).

Take a dog. It develops bad habits. Do you leave it with those bad habits? Shit no! You train it. Positive and negative reinforcement, depending upon what’s appropriate. Eventually you end up with a well-trained and well-behaved dog.

In the old days they had ways of controlling (training) their women. Punishments. Social ostracism which was a force that actually meant something. They were married young before they started messing around, then it became the new husband’s job to train and deal with her appropriately. Even boot her out if she was far too obstroperous, the children (if any) going to him because he had the income and could afford to raise them.

Hypergamy is an evolved sexual strategy that’s worked for women for millennia. The behaviors associated with women’s sexual strategy (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks) is a deductive manifestation of Hypergamy. On a societal level, the very fact that men would need to effect social control of Hypergamy validates the inherency of Hypergamy in women.

In the past polygamy, arranged marriages, courting rituals, petitioning a father for permission to marry his daughter and many other traditions that are now characterized as oppressive and antiquated were direct contingencies for men’s ambient awareness of women’s innate predilection for Hypergamy. It’s interesting that BPS should analogize women as untrained dogs without considering a dog is still going to do what a dog’s going to do. The operative condition being that a dog is going to be motivated by what’s been coded into its instinctual firmware as a result of what’s been evolutionarily beneficial to the survival of the canine species. The operant conditioning is training that dog to perform desired behaviors counter to that instinct.

But, I get it, there’s a real want for men frustrated by women’s Hypergamously motivated behavior to effect control by appealing to notions of personal responsibility. BPS makes the common error of (indirectly) appealing to women’s reason, as the rationally independent agents, who should logically want to be personally responsible for their bad behavior, or need some extrinsic correcting of them. A lifelong conditioning of egalitarian equalism has taught them that women should be as equitably deductive as men.

Men shouldn’t need to train women to act in both sexes’ best interests; as rational agents they should want to do this of their own accord.

It just doesn’t make sense that women would publically express a logical interest in, and desire for the comfort, dependability, provisioning and nurturing of a devoted Beta, yet overtly behave counter to that sentiment during the proliferative phase of her ovulatory cycle by directly inviting the sexual attentions of the most Alpha men her attractiveness can afford her.

What BPS has inadvertently illustrated here is the base conflict in the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies:

The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies:For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

For the better part of human history, by violence or by social convention, men controlled, and instinctually understood, women’s Hypergamous natures. By rape, religion or resources men effectively made women compromise their sexual strategy. In fact to be a man was to understand one’s social station as being above, and responsible for, directing that of women’s.

What nearly all modern Christians have done is place romantic love above marriage. Instead of seeing marriage as the moral context to pursue romantic love and sex, romantic love is now seen as the moral place to experience sex and marriage. This inversion is subtle enough that no one seems to have noticed, but if you look for it you will see it everywhere.

Lifetime marriage, with separate defined roles for husband and wife and true commitment is what makes sex and romantic love moral in the biblical view. In our new view, romantic love makes sex moral, and the purpose of marriage is to publicly declare that you are experiencing the highest form of romantic love. Thus people now commonly refer to a wedding as “making our love official”.

The gradations we now apply to romantic love are symptomatic of the problem. We take great care to distinguish between “pure love” or “true love” and mere “infatuation” or “puppy love”.

[…] Because it is love and not marriage which now confers morality upon sex, sex outside of marriage is now considered moral so long as you are in love. Thus we have the modern harlot’s defense/anthem “but we were in love!”

When you remove the moral connotations, what Dal describes here is an excellent parallel to the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies. On a meta-societal scale, contemporary men have abdicated any claim to directing the process of how or with whom their genetic legacy will be preserved. And while the Feminine Imperative will expend great efforts to convince men, socially and legalistically, that their involvement in that decision making process isn’t important, on a societal level the fact remains – men must be made to (sometimes forcibly) abandon their sexual strategy and their genetic interests in favor of feminine Hypergamy.

One reason a father would symbolically ‘give’ his daughter away to her husband as part of the marriage ritual was a tacit acknowledgment of his approval of this man’s quality and direction of his genetic potential. Similarly, a suitor asking a father’s permission to marry his daughter was part of the qualification. In both instances, there is a presumption of a male-directed process of directing a woman’s Hypergamy and prospectively directing his involvement with that new family. The presumption was one that men would directly influence feminine Hypergamy.

As human society evolved a precedence for romantic, feminine-controlled Hypergamy gradually supplanted this male-directed Hypergamy. I’ve written in the past of how courtly love’s bastardization of the original intent of chivalry was indirectly designed to be the feminism of the middle ages. By co-opting men’s sense of chivalric honor with feminine social importance, (if not primacy) the Feminine Imperative gradually established the social conventions that would lead to a feminine-primary direction of Hypergamy.

Romantic, feminine-defined love progressively delegitimized the old-order, male-directed definition of love. Marriage ceased to be the condition in which romantic love could be experienced and was supplanted by the prerequisite of a romantic love condition in order for a marriage to be legitimized. In so doing the meta-social dynamic of the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies shifted to feminine control.

At this point, I should note that the socially legitimized definition of love is not the same as each sex’s concept of love which is mirrored in either sex’s evolved sexual strategies. It’s important to remember the latent purpose of ensuring control over Hypergamy is the motive of forcing the romantic definition on a larger social order to the benefit of the feminine sexual strategy.

For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed, the other gender must compromise or abandon its own. In the old-order, men controlled and directed Hypergamy to a large extent and women had to compromise their strategy. In a post-sexual revolution social order, where women have effected a socially mandated, unilateral control over the direction of Hypergamy, a majority of men are forced to abandon their sexual strategy, and even the elite minority must eventually compromise their own. Legally, socially and psychologically men are expected to relinquish any claim to directing their own sexual strategy while deferring to women’s Hypergamy. Today, women qualify men for their Hypergamy with a right swipe on a Tinder profile.

The frustration BPS is writing about stems from the Old Set of Books expectation that women are predisposed to the functional, equitable equivalents of men’s rational based decision-making. The evolutionary nature of Hypergamy makes any notion of equalitarianism a recipe for men’s frustration. Hypergamy isn’t just a label, it’s a useful term for the very real dynamic of women’s sexual strategy.

BPS isn’t the first guy in the manosphere to blame men for their complicity in women behaving badly in their hypergamic interests. He’s lamenting a lack of men’s control over Hypergamy by making appeals to how it was in the good ole days and how men need to put their foot down and demand women to shape up or else they’ll stop playing their game. It’s bad men who permit women to behave badly and raise the next generation of yet more boys and girls who’ll behave even worse.

This then leads to the very appealing concept of personal responsibility – men are responsible for women’s irresponsibility, and exploring the nature of Hypergamy seems to only amount to a “the devil biology made her do it” excusability for that irresponsibility.

A large part of the red pill perspective leans on evolutionary psychology. Of course evo-psych isn’t the only factor in red pill awareness, but for the vast majority of Game deniers (people unaware of the origins of their conditions) this poses a problem of convenience. When the revelations of evo-psych agree with our comfortable social models and ego-investments we’re all too happy to embrace the science. But when the science shows us the more uncomfortable truths about evolved human nature, the reaction is to either question the ‘science’ or blame the moral conviction, resolve and character of the person/people expressing that aspect of human nature.

[…]Hypergamy (an evolved species-survival schema) doesn’t care about personal conviction, freewill or definitions of moral behavior, it just is. So in the interests of perpetuating the best interests of one sex (and by extension the entire species) social and cultural norms fluidly evolve around it to accommodate what’s really an uncomfortable aspect of our humanity. Can Hypergamy be controlled? Can men’s sexual impulses be tempered? Of course, but not without the effort of freewill, conviction and social structures. I know of precious few men who’ve blamed their infidelity or sexual impulsivity solely upon their biological makeup. With the exception of the more natural Alphas, more often than not it was a carefully calculated (Game) and coordinated event.

1.) You hear from one side of the argument to pursue your interests in life and women will come to you. This is what the MGTOW movement espouses. Im not sure if men can even be totally indifferent to the power of pussy. But some believe the total indifference is the key to a fulfilling love life. I have found that if you are indifferent then you will get nothing and be celibate. This doesn’t sound very good.

2.) The other argument is that you should not be indifferent at all. This school of thought says that dating is purely a numbers game. Its similar to sales. The more women you meet the higher the likely hood of one of these women liking you. The more approaches you do the more lays you get. Simple statistics. This school of thought is the opposite of indifference. This is the way i personally go about dating and i have had mediocre results. This is represented by the NEXTING mentality.

Not sure which one to choose or which one is correct. I do know that i am tired of being a slave to vagina. I do OK but it takes a ton of work to get one mediocre lay. Its not good for your self esteem either. Being rejected or toyed with mentally is unhealthy for your psyche. Most of my friends are also slaves to getting laid. Roosh V made a post about how ” His Boner is his master”.

So is it ” Pursue your interests in life and women will take care of themselves” vs ” Go out and do the field work”..which one will lead to a more fulfilling life?

Before we get down to nuts and bolts here let me address this last part first. There is no such thing as a “fulfilled” life. God forbid you reach fulfillment in life. The human state is one of a perpetuated discontent, and so long as that discontent is constructively pursued, this is a good thing. When anyone presents you with a plan or an abstract for life fulfillment, understand that they are selling you something based on the very human want for a better life.

That said, the rest of the question makes for some interesting debate. I often read a common thread in the manosphere about how men should develop some mental disposition of “outcome independence.” I understand the sentiment and why it would be beneficial for any guy to simply shrug his shoulders and say “either way, yes, no, I’m good with it”, but what this really boils down to is another indirect Buffer against real rejection.

I’ve read some ‘life coaches’ rattle off something similar. The idea is that if you put yourself out there, just by doing so, a woman will appreciate the inherent risk of rejection in your approach and at least give you merit points for trying when she does reject you. It’s a flawed idea because it presumes the women you’d approach would have any capacity to recognize that risk, much less reward the effort. It presumes that women would have that rational insight in the moment and think “well, he must have confidence for just trying to hit on me” and add that to some subconscious list of pros and cons for accepting or rejecting him.

And of course when it comes to light that the majority of women don’t have any concept of the approach-risk appreciation they’re supposed to have, that’s when a guy is told he’s hitting on the wrong kind of woman – they’re not the “quality” women they should be risking themselves with.

So the next deductive step becomes one of insulating oneself against that rejection preemptively. Thus, outcome independence becomes not just a mindset, but also a (misguided) Game strategy. Therein lies the conflict; is outcome independence who you are or is it a strategy disconnected from yourself which you rely on to Buffer rejection?

The idea goes that if a man is truly outcome-independent with his being rejected by a woman, the first indicator of that independence is a freedom to be vulnerable with her. The approach then becomes one of “hey, I’m just gonna be my vulnerable self and if you’re not into me then I’m cool with that.”

The hope is that a woman will receive this approach as intended and find something refreshing about it, but the sad truth is that if this were the attraction key its promoters wish it was, every guy ‘just being himself‘ would be swimming in top shelf pussy. This is a central element to Beta Game – the hope that a man’s openness will set him apart from ‘other guys’ – it is common practice for men who believe in the equalist fantasy that women will rise above their feral natures when it comes to attraction, and base their sexual selection on his emotional intelligence.

The fact is that there is no such thing as outcome independence. The very act of your approaching a woman means you have made some effort to arrive at a favorable outcome with her. The fact that you’d believe a woman would even find your vulnerability attractive voids any pretense of outcome independence.

In a larger scope, there is no real outcome independence. Even making the effort to adopt that IDGAF mindset is itself an investment in an outcome. If you were truly indifferent to the outcome of a situation there would be no discussion about it.

Being truly indifferent to whether or not a woman accepts or rejects you implies a disinterest in that woman’s interests in you. There are certainly ways to insulate oneself against a negative outcome, but outcome independence is not Game itself. You will learn more from your failures than from your successes.

With that in mind Pandora raises some interesting propositions here:

1.) You hear from one side of the argument to pursue your interests in life and women will come to you. This is what the MGTOW movement espouses. I’m not sure if men can even be totally indifferent to the power of pussy. But some believe the total indifference is the key to a fulfilling love life. I have found that if you are indifferent then you will get nothing and be celibate. This doesn’t sound very good.

I think for the most part this want for indifference gets pushed to extremes. As I’ve stated many times, a woman should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it. However, that doesn’t mean a complete dissociation from women is healthy. For a woman to be a complement to your life you’ll need interact with, and understand the nature of, women.

Forget all those romantic cliches of the leading man proclaiming his undying love for the woman who completes him. Despite whatever protestations to the contrary, women do not want to be “The One” or the center of a man’s existence. They in fact want to subordinate themselves to a worthy man’s life purpose, to help him achieve that purpose with their feminine support, and to follow the path he lays out. You must respect a woman’s integrity and not lie to her that she is “your everything”. She is not your everything, and if she is, she will soon not be anymore.

What this commandment doesn’t presuppose is that there isn’t a woman in a man’s life to be superseded by his mission. It’s not all mission, no woman. The MGTOW branch of the manosphere is made up of a diverse set of guys. From my experience not all MGTOWs are interested in complete indifference to women; most would be happy to have women be interested in them enough to make an effort to associate themselves with them, they just don’t see the point in making a direct effort to make those connections. Others simply resign themselves to isolation and meeting their physical needs with porn or escorts while they ‘enjoy’ life and pursue their own interests absent of women.

There is an inherent problem in this latter MGTOW preference, they build a fortress around themselves:

Law 18: Do Not Build Fortresses to Protect Yourself— Isolation is Dangerous
The world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere— everyone has to protect themselves. A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to more dangers than it protects you from-it cuts you off from valuable information, it makes you conspicuous and an easy target. Better to circulate among people, find allies, mingle. You are shielded from your enemies by the crowd.

You cannot entirely remove yourself from the Game. You can cede the governance of your participation in intersexual dynamics to whatever or whomever you think may control it, but you cannot recuse yourself from its influences. This is a foundational truth I think some MRAs and the more isolationist MGTOWs believe they can in some way buffer for themselves. They believe that not playing the Game is a preferable situation to “dealing” with the means and efforts necessary to “succeed” with women.

The natural progression then becomes one of self-affirmation in the belief that they’re not ‘dealing’ with women, and any guy who is is little more than a slave doing the bidding of women by even his interest in applying an effort to understand and interact with them. Even the most marginal effort becomes ‘pussy begging’.

Hater: Men who run game are just doing the bidding of women. Alphas don’t entertain women.

If you want success with women, you are going to have to entertain them… one way or the other. The same is true of women. Once a woman stops entertaining men with her body, her femininity, and her commitment worthiness by getting fat, old, ugly, bitchy, or single mom-y, she stops having success with men. We are all doing the bidding of our biomechanical overlord, and on our knees to his will we surrender, by force or by choice. You fool yourself if you believe you have some plenary indulgence from this stark reality.
Or: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

The problem with the ‘pussy begging’ rationale becomes one of defining what degree of interest a man ought to have with women. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; the women who accommodate this level of (dis)interest become ‘quality women’ while those who don’t align with that impression serve as convenient proof of their isolationist belief. The latent rationale becomes one of sour grapes, disdain the things you can’t have while making necessity a virtue. If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.The logic then becomes circular.

The opposite extreme, and one intersexual isolationists like to promote, is that it’s all a numbers game with regards to any “success” with women. If you throw enough spaghetti against the wall something will stick. Isolationists would have us believe that even what sticks is rarely worth the effort (sour grapes), but if you play the game often enough what you get is due more to persistence than any real accuracy of applied Game.

So is it ” Pursue your interests in life and women will take care of themselves” vs ” Go out and do the field work”..which one will lead to a more fulfilling life?

I’d say a measured balance of both. I don’t believe for a moment that any man is functionally indifferent to the influence of women. Men are the True Romantics; we want our idealistic impression of love to be impossibly reciprocated. We look for ways to buffer the frustration of trying to make our concept of love and female acceptance fit women’s when we don’t understand that each sex adheres to separate ideals. Outcome independence, isolationism, are ways some men think they can enforce our ideal as the standard for women.

With the Feminine Imperative in social ascendance women enforce a Hypergamous ideal that imbalances intergender dynamics, but that doesn’t mean men are powerless to effect their own interests and draw women into men’s Frame. The solution isn’t one of ‘taking all your toys and going home’ to wait for women to come around to appreciate men. It’s going to take a learned interaction.

The real pussy begging comes from demanding a woman to come over to your perspective unbidden and unmerited. Make your mission not your woman your imperative, but in that mission be the Man a woman will want to be associated with. I always stress the importance of Frame control – it’s the first Iron Rule of Tomassi – but this presupposes you have command of that frame to begin with. She enters your reality, you don’t enter hers, but you must have a reality a woman wants to enter into before you can maintain it.